St Peter, Carlton
www.suffolkchurches.co.uk - a journey through the churches of Suffolk
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St Peter, Carlton |
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www.suffolkchurches.co.uk - a journey through the churches of Suffolk |
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Follow these journeys as they happen on X/twitter and bluesky
| No county I know has as many
churches distant from the nearest road as Suffolk. Along
with Kelsale, with which it forms a joint parish, Carlton
is the northern suburb of the town of Saxmundham, but its
church sits remotely away from the houses, with just the
Hall and an industrial estate for company. To reach it
you have to go down a dirt track from Carlton Green for
about a third of a mile. It jinks behind the Hall and
disappears from view, and you would not know that the
church was there to look for, without a map. Unusually
for Suffolk, St Peter is kept locked without a keyholder,
and coming back in the early spring of 2025 it looked
very much as if the church was no longer in use for
services, all these now taking place at Kelsale or in the
centre of Saxmundham. The middle photograph in the second
row at the top, which I took in 2012, shows that there
were still two services a month here at the time, but
this appears to no longer be the case. However, its
churchyard is obviously still in use for burials, and I
assume this where the people of Saxmundham can come to
spend eternity. The slimly built red brick tower is an elegant sight against the green of the churchyard. Bequests in 1477 and 1481 left money to the building of the tower of Carlton juxta Kelsale, and in 1500 WIlliam Peche left 10 marks, about £6000 in today's money, to the new candlebeam, which is to say the roodscreen, suggesting the body of the church was complete at this time - indeed, much of the work appears to date from the early 14th Century. There was a major restoration of the nave and interior in the 1860s, and of the chancel in the 1880s. It's safe to say that not a lot has happened here since, and the church appears to be in a poor condition, with sagging guttering and moss filling the cracks in the stonework and on the roof. The porch was full of dead leaves and litter. James Bettley, revising the East Suffolk volume of the Buildings of England series in the early years of this century, recorded 16th and 17th Century furnishings and 15th Century figure brasses inside. If they are still there then their survival must give some cause for concern. After a number of attempts over the last thirty years, this remains one of three of Suffolk's medieval churches that I still have to see inside. It's depressing, for here was a perfectly serviceable little medieval church, and it may soon to be lost to us. Poking around in the churchyard, I found the headstone of Paul Randolph Cobbold, a member of a minor branch of the locally important Cobbold family. Paul Cobbold was the younger brother of the Reverend Robert Henry Cobbold, a celebrated far eastern missionary who was also, incidentally, the only Cobbold to have rowed in the Oxford v Cambridge boat race. They would have been cousins, I think, of that more famous Reverend Richard Cobbold who wrote the best-selling 1845 novel The History of Margaret Catchpole. A student at Trinity College, Paul Cobbold died at the age of just 22 in Cambridge. 1849 was the year of a major cholera outbreak in the city, so perhaps he succumbed to that. Curiously, he seems to have found the time and opportunity to marry. Almost certainly, he would have gone into the Church if he hadn't died. |
Simon Knott, April 2025
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